Virus
by thoth-moon
Summary: Kurama's breach of identities, set to a viral metaphor.
1. Vaccine

**A/N: **Remember me, folks? I know—this is the first thing I've put out since mid-summer! I've been fairly busy—I moved into a new place near my school, which obviously I've been attending, while picking up a little bit of work. I have been writing bits and pieces for my WIPs, so don't worry, they're neither forgotten or abandoned. I'm on break between semesters at the moment, so I thought I'd harness my time to get a leg back into writing and updating.

I started this last month with the intent of a one-shot. Since then this has become a three-chapter project, with the tentative one-shot becoming this first chapter. I got the idea from something we discussed in my Philosophy of Technology class, about how a virus actually alters the structure of a person's DNA—as does the vaccine given to prevent the virus, altering said DNA in anticipation of the bigger hit, providing a resistance. I decided to apply that here as a metaphor.

So this first chapter is entitled "Vaccine," and takes place during the Dark Tournament, shortly after Kurama's first transformation into Yoko Kurama. Yusuke's not present because, as I recall, he was busy getting jolted in a cave while that round was going on. . It's been a while since I've seen these episodes, but I aimed to keep the majority of events peripheral to this story vague enough that I'm hopefully not messing up the chronology of anything.

Onward:

**vir·us: **the causative agent of an infection disease

**vac·cine: **a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease

All definitions courtesy of _Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary._

**Disclaimer: **Yu Yu Hakusho is the creation of Yoshihiro Togashi and belongs to him and his business affiliates. Ideas expressed in this story are my own and I make no monetary profit from them whatsoever.

---

**Virus****  
01: Vaccine  
28 December 2009**

**---  
**

He was getting looks.

From the spectators, whose mouths just earlier in the week had spat out insults.

From the opponents, whose condescending leers were now tinged with lust for the challenge.

From the teammates, whose foci wouldn't divert far from the redheaded point in the room, him.

To be fair, it might have been his food.

It was a steak, just like what was on the other two plates. It wasn't as well-done as Kuwabara's. In fact, it was bleeding, more so than Hiei's.

Kurama looked at it.

"Send it back," Kuwabara said, face scrunched with disgust. "This is sabotage by food poisoning!"

"Unlikely," Kurama murmured, still looking at it. Part of him wanted to postulate that—"Maybe they thought they were feeding a demon," he said absently.

He was hungry.

Eyes, four or five of them, on him as he pulled the plate closer to him, sank the fork tongs into the meat (more blood), grabbed the knife.

"You're gonna _eat that?_" Kuwabara asked in disbelief.

Hiei said nothing.

Kurama looked up abruptly. He was already chewing his first bite, and a little blood dribbled down his chin. He wiped it away. "Can I?" he asked.

No one said anything.

Kurama continued to eat, chewing the meat between dull human teeth, washing his tongue in the blood that leaked from the carnal bolus in the back of his mouth.

Thus, he was getting looks.

"How's it taste?" Kuwabara ventured.

"Adequate," he replied conservatively. He kept chewing.

It was delicious.

"Hungry?" Hiei asked in an offhanded, bored way.

"Yes," he answered, taking another bloody bite.

Very, suddenly. He was ravenous.

Kuwabara was blunt. "Do you feel any different?"

Because of a little rare meat? "N—"

Then it hit him, and Kurama looked up from his plate. "Because of Yoko?" Kuwabara nodded; Hiei seemed to look at him a little harder. "No," he said, popping another bite in his mouth.

Still the looks. "Oh," Kuwabara said.

_Liar, _Hiei stared.

Kurama swallowed. "Yes."

Something in him stirred.

* * *

Looks from the looking-glass.

Mirror-eyes studied him as he in turn scrutinized the form in the glass. _This is not my body_, he reflected, staring at the green-eyed, redheaded creature in the other dimension, and wondering if he directed those thoughts as much toward the flesh he looked out from as well.

Heaving a sigh, he leaned forward and rested his brow against the steamed glass. It felt cool on his skin.

His skin?

_My skin is not my own_, he thought, smiling faintly. Frank Herbert: a sign of high intellect given way to nerdiness, if ever there was one.

And he'd read those books, hadn't he? He, _Shuichi_, who only grit his teeth against a recurring stomach pang, because there stirred in an even more visceral depth of himself something parasitic, awake now only thanks to a whiff of miasmic air, fresh to it and toxic to him. Revived now, it made its presence palpable via a desperate and near-maddening gnawing, like that of a tapeworm, scraping his insides and yelling at him, demanding from him, _Feed me!_

_Feed me, Seymour!_

He chuckled a little. Oh, he _was _Shuichi; and that phantom come to surface earlier was the parasite, the—

He closed his eyes and shuddered, shivered, hugged himself against the chill and backed away from the cooling glass and porcelain, but the chill persisted.

"Are you sick?"

His surprise betrayed itself in a flinch. He took a breath. "Pardon?" he said, twisting his body round.

With narrowed eyes Hiei considered him from the threshold. "I want the shower," the Jaganshi said flatly. "Retch if you have to, but flush that toilet and I _will _put you out of your misery."

Ah. "I'm fine, Hiei. Just cold." Hungry, nauseous, shaking…

"Perhaps you should put your towel back on," Hiei said mildly.

"What—?" he began to reply, and then with a more prominent chill realized that his towel was in fact on the floor, having probably fallen during his self-reflection. A bit of heat returned—to his face, at least—as he stooped to pick it up, and replace it around his waist.

Hiei watched him. "You coloring's changed."

He paused. "Excuse me?"

"The color." Hiei shifted, made a gesture. "On you. It's different." Kurama looked at him, looked at the mirror again. The Jaganshi shrugged. "Never mind. Maybe it's because you're sick."

"I'm—"

"Fine," Hiei finished, walking past him. "Could be the lighting. Could be my imagination." He stood before the shower and began to undress. Kurama remained in front of the sink, his expression troubled.

"If you're cold," Hiei said while turning on the faucets, "getting dressed might help."

Right. "Yes," he agreed, tightening his towel round himself and telling this body, his body, _Move! _He'd forgotten he was cold.

He'd forgotten the moment he saw Hiei undress.

Something in him stirred.

* * *

He was in the bedroom he shared with Hiei. He hadn't dressed yet. He had the lights on, and stood in front of another mirror, and stared hard.

Maybe too hard. Maybe he was imagining. He had to be, for something so minute to have suddenly grown so profound.

For surely Hiei had _not _meant his pubic hair—had he?

Kurama glared at the red bush that bloomed around his genitals. _Rose bush_, he thought with a wan smile. _Was _it darker?

_If _there was a change, though, wouldn't it have made more sense for the color to _lighten? _He looked his reflection up and down, while the mirror-eyes reciprocated. His skin seemed lighter, clearer. It seemed to contrast with his hair more.

Or maybe it was the lighting. Or the mirror.

He groaned. Or maybe it was all in his head.

Hiei was probably right. The Jaganshi was his partner, and surely as Kurama could appraise Hiei for any abnormalities—a change in attitude or an incapacitated arm—Hiei could reciprocate.

Here's to Hiei doing so without feeling aroused. Kurama had already learned by experience not to underestimate the demonic nature of human puberty. Perhaps it factored into his greater toleration of their teammates' quirks.

He sighed, and curled up on his side on his bed. For his verbose conduct, Kuwabara was ultimately a gentleman; and for Yusuke's typical adolescent crassness…

Another sigh. Even if Shuichi Minamino's behavior was more temperate than the average pubescent human male, he was a demon. Possessed by a demon, as surely the surge in energy flow had caused a surge in other flows as well. He sighed, reached up his hand, and pushed his still-damp hair back.

He sighed, reached down his hand, and parted his hair there.

He sighed.

Blood rushed to one head, blood rushed to another. Kurama stretched his legs out, flexed his toes. He shuddered pleasantly.

Ages ago, that first shudder heralded a long line of nights spent in warm beds, heat shared with intimate and anonymous partners alike. Now, he was rubbing himself among chilly sheets, and thinking that even a year ago, his life had been much more simplistic and contained, that even now he might still have a greater degree of control, were it not for _this body _having technical difficult—

"A-Ah!" he cried, jerking his trunk one way while bucking his hips another. He closed his eyes and nuzzled his cheek against the pillow. And then he sighed.

Or perhaps he groaned.

Or perhaps he sobbed.

The door opened. Slitting his eyes, he watched Hiei come in, toweling off his hair. It was the only towel he had. Kurama closed his eyes and turned his head away.

Hiei detected his movement. Kurama heard him turn, felt his eyes.

"Well?"

Kurama stayed still. "Well, what?"

"Are you still sick?"

If even one of them took ill presently, it would bode such for all of them. "I'm not sick," he said. He could still feel Hiei standing over his bed, watching him. He'd never gotten dressed like he said he would.

Something stirred in him. He imagined he heard it this time, a visceral growl rumbling outward from is core. "I'm hungry," he said.

Nothing stirred in the shadow cast over him. "You're hungry," its source said.

"I exerted an unexpectedly high amount of energy today." And leftover energies were still stirred up like molecules put to heat. Although, to say that _he _had "exerted" or done anything else with that energy was nowhere near factual. Rather, that energy had been wrenched out of him, torn forward from his primal store, briefly, and then jammed back in. The sentiment brought to mind a similar insult done to Kurama's physical innards, the contents packed back in out of alignment.

_Malpractice! _his cells screamed, while their nuclei glowed and swelled and vomited with this newly-awakened potency, awesome and awful.

He could feel Hiei's eyes on his nude profile. "Do you want anything?" the Jaganshi asked after a full minute.

_You_, something down to his newly-mutated cells said, screamed. He closed his eyes tighter, darkness aside, but this didn't stifle his vision of Hiei's body naked in the shower, tanned back, muscular frame grown more defined recently with additional conditioning. Kurama's own muscles tensed; he bit his lip.

"Kurama." He continued to bite, but let a semi-coherent "Huh?" slip between tooth and flesh. "Do you need anything?"

He needed that box to open again. he needed that box to have never opened to begin with. He needed to hide somewhere alone. He needed Hiei in bed beside him.

He couldn't voice any of these needs, and so he voiced nothing, thus prompting Hiei to repeat the admonition, "Don't get sick right now."

Hiei didn't do so groundlessly, Kurama knew. Considering the odds intentionally weighed against them, no one on the team should fall out of sorts at present. Knowing this, Kurama also wanted to decry the unfairness—the hypocrisy—of Hiei's prohibition, wanted to snap that _no one _had managed to sift their own agendas out of collective well-being—so who was Hiei to lecture him, who had asked for that box t catalyze the _thing _deep in his viscera no more than he had asked for the chemicals in this body, his body, to start secreting sabotage.

Sabotage aside, however, he was the group's Common Sense. "I'm not…" he began faintly, unsure what he was actually protesting. As he wondered this he turned slowly toward his partner, saw his partner, locked eyes with his partner's natural pair—and lost control of coherent thought. He made a sick sound from somewhere deep in his stomach, where his wind, his resolution, should have been. He squirmed, having lost the order best suited for arranging his too-long, too-bare legs.

He could not fault Hiei for staring, could not fault Hiei, much as it made his insides churn, when the other demon, _other _demon, said "Kurama?" without the non-inflection of full-fledged boredom. _Revert to no concern! _Kurama wanted to implore him, wishing that he was still in the shower.

Shower. Hiei naked, much as he was now, but. His eyes were not his own, led astray by thoughts that were not his own, _could not _be his own, so vindictive that even when he squeezed his eyes shut the traitorous images persisted: _Hiei naked, soap water running down lines as clearly defined as though etched there by a sculptor, white lather like chalk added for definition, white lather down to those thighs, to…_

If Hiei were Yomi—and the two did share a certain recklessness, a certain abandon of common sense and heed to external instruction—Kurama would jump him, pounce on him and pin him down, prone or supine, brace his hands against tense hard muscle while he thrusted, arched or pounded down, relishing and even hoping for resistance, the angry gnashing of teeth, the spiteful wedding of ivory snarl with flushed flesh. And if he were Kuronue—which given time and maturation, he might more closely resemble—Kurama would smile a smile cultivated to look coy so as to be in fact lecherous, and either creep on top of him, or taking him by the hand guide him over…

But he was Hiei.

And Kurama kissed him.

Perhaps he'd been readying to say something, or abut to protest, because what Kurama's open mouth found was hot and wet, and contained something that wriggled in greeting. Kurama stroked it back to its base, while outside their mouths his hands gripped Hiei's biceps, his chest heaved against Hiei's pecs, his body, this body, frenzied, the one that was his outlet as still as the chiseled statue in his mental comparison.

Hiei did not shove him off. Hiei did not have to, for almost as soon as Kurama latched on, he reeled away as violently as if he'd been thrown. He gasped, chest heaving, and stared at Hiei with the same wide-open yet unseeing eyes of an air-drowned fish, no longer cold.

No longer cold. Far from cold. Kurama stared at Hiei, naked Hiei, who had not even the towel anymore and so was naked as he. But Kurama could not discern the features of Hiei's face, could not even discern these physical details that a moment ago he had fixated with such eroticism. Something stirred inside him, but it was not that something that split his vision facing inward facing outward at once miniscule and grotesquely mammoth in sight of the macrocosm the microcosm within without him.

No longer cold. Hot. Uncomfortably hot.

Something stirred inside him. His feet could barely outspeed his flinching stomach as he forgot Hiei, forgot all beyond immediate necessity as he vaulted off the bed, ran into and repelled off the doorframe, collapsed to his knees upon the tile which surrounded his white porcelain target, flung up the lid—yelped as it ricocheted off the tank and came crashing back down upon his head—and wrung out his stomach.

Water into water. Something stirred inside the bowl.

Something stirred across the floor. Something cast a shadow over him. He didn't raise his head to look. He didn't feel he could. At the moment if felt like the toilet alone kept him upright and not crumpling head-first to the floor.

Hiei spoke. "Not sick," he said tonelessly. Then: "How fine are you down there?"

Weakly Kurama propped himself up on the collapsed steeple of his hands. "I think I have a virus," he said, voice a low groan.

"You have food poisoning," Hiei told him, adding, as though he had it himself, "Kuwabara was right. A human body shouldn't consume flesh that fresh."

Human body. This body. His body. Kurama couldn't tell if that was truly disappointment that he heard in Hiei's voice, or if it was placed there by his own agitated mind. "I…" he panted, trying to prop himself up. He weaved back and forth, up and down, elbows flexing, and managed to push himself back so that he sat on his heels.

_I?_

"Sorry," he murmured, head tilted forward, eyes cast downward.

Something sailed through the air, landed on him. The world was white as porcelain, though softer than the tile against which his knees ached, or the toilet against which his skin chilled. How interesting, when he was sure his skin must be mottled strawberries-and-cream from the effort of heaving. At least the flush in his flesh had migrated northward, he though with a mixture of relief and shame.

Hot and cold. The flush in his flesh began to subside as slowly he rose on quaking limbs, tried and on the third attempt successfully gripped and pushed down the handle on the tank. The towel slid off his head.

Eyes on him. He caught the towel and clumsily placed it round his waist. "Sorry," he murmured again. He shuddered. Hot and cold.

The faucet ran. Hiei was wetting a washcloth in the sink, was handing it to him. Handing it to his waiting hand. _My body is not my own_, he thought abstractly, gawking down at it was seemingly without thinking he took it.

"You're pale," Hiei told him. "You're flushed. Go lie down."

Kurama blinked, blank. He swayed on his feet. "I'm sick' he said, whispered, licking dry lips; to no avail—his mouth was like cotton, like the towel that hung off his hips.

"It'll pass," Hiei said.

_Will it? _Kurama wanted to ask. He stared at the Jaganshi with the wide-open fish eyes of the afflicted and overwhelmed.

The Jaganshi stared back with the narrowed sulphuric eyes of the tried and tired. "Don't be belligerent," he said brusquely. He grabbed Kurama's wrist and pushed his arm upward. Kurama caught on, and held the wet cloth to his forehead. Hot and cold. Hiei placed a hand firmly on the Fox's hip and steered him toward the door. He caught on, and stumbled to his bed, Hiei spotting him from behind.

"Go to sleep," Hiei told him as he lied down. "Don't eat any more raw meat. You'll get over it."

_Would he?_

_

* * *

  
_

He was getting looks.

From the spectators, whose mouths baited him with cat-calls.

From the opponents, whose condescending leers dissected him as he passed.

From the teammates, whose foci would lock in on him on a spare beat.

To be fair, it might have been anticipation.

"Feeling better?" Kuwabara asked uncertainly.

A skeptical look passed out the corner of Hiei's eyes into the corner of his own. "Yes," Kurama said, masking his own uncertainty.

Something in him stirred.

---

**End "Vaccine"**

**

* * *

  
**

**A/N: **Next chapter's set to be called "Virulence" and should take place during the Three Kings Saga. Let me know what you think so far. Good to be back!


	2. Virulence

**A/N: **Believe it or not, I've been at work on this off-and-on for a couple of months! Here goes the second of three installations of this project, the chapter "Virulence."

Reiterating my description of this little project from the debut chapter: "I got the idea from something we discussed in my Philosophy of Technology class, about how a virus actually alters the structure of a person's DNA—as does the vaccine given to prevent the virus, altering said DNA in anticipation of the bigger hit, providing a resistance. I decided to apply that here as a metaphor."

And I must say, I'm happy with the feedback I've gotten thus far, for just the first chapter! So now that we're refreshed, the setting of "Virulence" is the Three Kings Saga, in Gandhara. That little information should be all the explanation needed for what comes to follow.

Let it proliferate!

**vir·us: **the causative agent of an infection disease

**vir·u·lence: **the quality or state of being virulent: as **a : ** the relative severity and malignancy of a disease **b : ** the relative capacity of a pathogen to overcome body defenses

Definitions courtesy of _Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary_.

**Disclaimer: **Yu Yu Hakusho is the creation of Yoshihiro Togashi and belongs to him and his business affiliates. Ideas expressed in this story are my own and I make no monetary profit from them whatsoever.

**Virus  
****02: Virulence  
7 August 2010**

Gandhara was humid.

Or, that was the reason Kurama gave for how much he was sweating.

Yomi smirked. "I'd accept that as a valid excuse, if we were outside."

Red brows knitted ever-so-slightly. What Yomi had lost in reckless perniciousness, he'd gained in a manner more elegant: microscopic, irritating observation. Kurama felt as though he were sitting on a sample slide, suffocated between the two panes of glass.

That he was all but officially labeled a hostage of Gandhara, that he was personally blackmailed to politically aid Yomi, that his parasite-ridden brother and his oblivious parents were the collateral that Yomi _said _would be seized should the king of Gandhara be crossed—all of this, Kurama could deal with. He could understand it, he could control it through appeasement, and manipulate it through his own deals, under Yomi's radar but not against the Goat's mandates. He could make order of it, and so he could tolerate it.

It was the day-to-day, the apolitical and the personal, which ate at him, which sometimes made him question what demons were more dangerous: those prowling Yomi's capital; those lurking beyond the borders, threatening to invade;—or the one inside himself?

His basest personal habits had become an irritant to his employer and jailer. The most basic and obvious one made itself known before Kurama passed his first twenty-four hours, his first full human day, as Yomi's new advisor. This was a matter of sustenance: the majority of Gandharan fare was inedible to the demon with the human digestive tract. Yomi's cooks took offense when they saw Kurama pick through his tentative meals for any sign that it might contain a fellow denizen of Ningenkai; they took greater offense when, once assured he was not about to become a cannibal, Kurama would send the dish back, saying it was undercooked, expressing concerns of contamination and food poisoning. Grumbles were heard, the bold questioning the sense of Lord Yomi listening to a hardly-demon that dined on burnt food.

Unbeknownst to his visitor, Yomi thought to supplement said visitor's diet with a steroid to stave off the effects of malnutrition. Kurama grew wise to his attempts with uncomfortable velocity, and he fasted for a week in retaliation. After this botched experiment, Gandhara's new advisor refused to consume anything other than Makai plant matter, the toxicity of which he was able to eradicate, or at least dilute, with his abilities, and vitamin supplements he brought with him from Ningenkai. That anything fluid that he took was probably, and in some cases certainly laced, was a matter distressing enough to make Kurama test his endurance against dehydration.

His "host" was not amused, and when one afternoon Kurama began, in the middle of an air-conditioned conference room, to break out in a sweat, a heated argument followed. When Kurama's attempt to blame the humidity outside was dismissed, he told Yomi with an air of finality that there were certain vapors in the Makai air that his body was not yet used to. He refused even the tamest of over-the-counter-grade Makai medicinals.

He rose from his chair, and his knees buckled; his legs gave out under him. When Yomi's hands steadied him, they grew wet with the perspiration that had seeped through his clothes.

"I won't take anything!" Kurama snarled, after Yomi had taken him to the nearest bedroom—the demon king's, withholding from him the meager security of his "own" space and furnishings—, taken off his wet clothes (ignoring his protestations, verbal and physical, while doing so), and offered him something clear and fluid in a glass. "I don't appreciate you secretly poisoning me; I won't aid you in doing so directly."

"I don't appreciate you deliberately damaging yourself to spite me," Yomi replied. He wore upon his face a sour expression, as if he'd bitten into a piece of unripe fruit.

"Damage to me is tolerable, then, so long as _you _are the one inflicting it?" The heat of Kurama's body did battle with the cool of yet another air-conditioned room; the cool won, rapidly chilling the saltwater covering his body. He clenched his teeth and curled up chest-to-knees, rocking. "Take me to _my _room, at least," he told Yomi. "My coat's there."

Yomi had the audacity to smirk a little, and draped his own over Kurama's naked, shivering, nonetheless still-sweating frame. It was warm on Kurama, and smelled of birch tar, a pungency akin to barbecue sauce, the demon king's own personal scent.

Then the corners of Yomi's mouth turned down; his forehead creased and furrowed pensively. "You seemed to breathe the air fine when you arrived," he told Kurama dubiously.

"I was not made to live in it on a daily basis then," Kurama retorted.

"You've developed an affliction, then." Something of Yomi's smirk returned, self-satisfied and rueful. "I ought to incapacitate you."

Kurama's flesh tensed. "No, Yomi," he said, defiant and pleading. Paranoid, he foresaw more blatant experiments, tweaking and tormenting his physiognomy, lurching beyond diet as medium to things involving vials and needles inserted into him directly. In frustration he bit his lip so hard that his eyes teared up. "It's not my lungs or my stomach. It's not this body."

It was something _in _this body, his body. Since the box had opened on him at the Dark Tournament, since he had like Jekyll taken the heterogenizing potion in the bottle, that thing had crept around inside him, hissing in his gases, swimming in his fluids, seeping into the lonely fibers that woven together made up his organs muscles and bones, contaminating him like a biohazard spill. Except unlike a typical contamination this one was sentient, ready to flare up spread out and take over, whenever he let his guard down. It happened whenever he lost his focus, let his mind relax however temporarily. At night he would crawl out of sleep drowsily, too hot and wet and air-thirsty, body tortured by a bawdy ballet performed by hands too ghostly and large to be his human own.

It happened whenever he lost control, lost mind-over-matter, and matter, made corrupt by that thing which seeped into its fibers and usurped his movements, rose up to betray him. Mind was displaced by emotion, so he had discovered during the recent Sensui fiasco, by whatever primal primacy, however temporary: rage, desperation, lust. The appointment of priority to _pathos_, then, was his more palpable self's undoing.

And here he was now, appealing to Yomi with _tears _in his eyes. _Pathetic._

Yomi's brows arched up above where his eyes had ceased to exist a thousand years before. Above those darkened, emptied, obscured caverns, it was a gesture of enlightenment; and once the mouth rejoined the brows in upward motion, it profaned itself: a gesture of a smug sense of understanding.

"It's not that body," Yomi agreed with him. "You possess a demonic soul in a demonic setting. That human body is the only incompatibility now."

Kurama shuddered. A demonic soul in a demonic setting, and a human body possessing and possessed by a demonic spirit, sinking its metaphysical claws, tightening its psychological grip, trying to turn him, to turn him back…

He shuddered—Started—

Against his forehead, Yomi's lips.

Lips, possessing the least and thinnest of skin on the body; consequently, among its most sensitive areas. Yet in this scenario it seemed as though the sensations were inverted, retrosenses: Yomi stone-still, meditatively so; and he quivering, all those lonely fibers dancing, rubbing up against each other, plummeting his body into a state of equilibrial anarchy.

On either side, Yomi's hands pressed him, quelling some of the shaking and holding him up. Kurama might have protested, but for the very fervent and very founded fear that his knees might betray him and send him floundering to Yomi's feet. Hands over feet, any day.

Yomi pulled away. "You're feverish," he stated the obvious. Kurama shuddered—not the fever this time: Yomi delivered a second pressing of the lips, superfluous and (he suspected) not entirely clinical. As though reading Kurama's previous thoughts, Yomi continued, "It could be a matter of equilibrium," adding vaguely, "Nature that is not even second nature to you anymore…"

_Nature?_

"'Nature'," Kurama repeated, taking care to enunciate it as statement, not question. "Weather, or?"

There was that self-satisfied, rueful smile again. "Homeostasis," Yomi said. "You're confronting an element that you lost, that you've forgotten what to do with. So you suffer."

Homeostasis…

—Indignation. Kurama took one cautious, experimental step backward. Physically; mentally his limbs, head, and every fiber between them reeled and splayed every which way. "I haven't forgotten anything," he told Yomi, told himself, whichever self. His legs trembled.

The Goat tilted his head thoughtfully. His lips looked more pronounced, as though some of Kurama's flush had transferred to him via the temperature-testing.

Or was that a notion existent solely in his own mind, an entity that was of late most potent in recalling his former self, playing tricks on his current self, psyching out his psyche.

Lips parted: "Perhaps you wish you had."

Curt, candid—correct? Kurama shook his head, more out of uncertainty than negation, knowing that Yomi would know, that his sharpened senses would, had notified him of Kurama's shaky own. Afraid that anything he'd say might come out traitorous, Kurama kept his mouth shut.

His silence passed classified, if not as consent, then as nonprotest; and so on either side of him Yomi's hold tightened, and Kurama took haphazard steps backward, not out of experimentation but out of direction not his own, but of Yomi, Yomi his Second who did not die, who never followed directions but directed him now, him now the Second, Yomi and him, back from the dead, Yomi who chose not and Kurama who chose again and again, and again, again soon, if he, _could he?_

Kurama, who presently chose not to choose.

And so Yomi directed him, directed him toward bed.

_Sickbed_, thought Kurama, and something stirred up, something that quivered, not as he had been, with the world threatening to implode—

_Enough_.

Kurama pushed Yomi's hands away, fell backwards, bounced once, and landed on his back, the skirts of his borrowed coat flapping open on either side of him. Horizontal Kurama, hot and wet inside this vertical tower, cool and dry, his body's current climate much more in sync with the Gandharan storms outside, though it was precisely his body, in opposition to environment and essence, that was out of sync, as pointed out by the demon who currently towered over him, vertical Yomi.

_Except,_

One part, spurred on by his nakedness, endeavoring up, up, and away from the rest of him, vertical.

And one part, spurred on by his nakedness, straining against cloth confines, away from Yomi, horizontal, reaching out toward him to say Hello.

Kurama saw, and despite himself (whichever self) smiled, a contortion of the face that began with a vague germ of self-deprecation, that quickly metastasized into something much lewder.

In a voice not unlike his own, he informed the warlord: "I'm no third-rate ghost."

Said warlord smirked, the ruefulness evaporated somewhere into Gandhara's humid atmosphere.

"Welcome, Yoko."

Convergence or divergence, the creature on the bed teetered precociously on pure, unadorned and undiluted _verge_ as surely as it teetered on an imperfect and shifting balance between body—fresh body, virtually untouched, no contact since the Dark Tournament—and the spirit, resuscitated, gasping, kicking and fighting—throwing himself at one demon (the one time, predicating a great deal of restraint, a lot of saving face) and fighting off another; and riding the waves between the two, the seasick mind, fighting that sentiment, fear and desire; Shuichi wanted to run, poor child, never had any say—but Yoko, roused and aroused over a year, wanted to play.

Yoko wanted to play.

Grunt from Yomi as he sprung, seized a piece of apparel and one, two, three, robes pants shirt, undid the whole ensemble; made the best of dull fingernails, dug into firm flesh, dragged them along until he found, grasped the bone that protruded from the flesh—

_Oomph! _from the demon king as his old comrade, now incapacitated, incarcerated, instigated a one-human bedroom revolt, and toppled him. Human flesh now ruled in the very gut of the land of human-eaters.

Under him Yomi's flesh heaved up and down; behind him Yomi's flesh stood straight up. Deep, diaphragmatic breaths under him, rapid beating blood flow behind him, and in him, the increasingly violent stirrings of the basest of impulses—No, basest dictated the purging of all embellishments—_pulse_, pure and simple, ushering, rushing those stirrings to the peripheries of his body and back to his core, sent out again renewed, refreshed, ready to revenge itself, if not upon internal then upon external catalysts.

And Yomi, still the fool, grinned up at the human mask, the delicate face adorning the swell of demonic fury gathered just behind it, channeling and funneling itself into a single, unadulterated form: _lust._

The mask cracked. Kurama's lips curled, much in the same manner as Yomi's, but with a different effect: a snarl rather than a grin. Deep within him, something set to simmer long ago had now simmered too long, and hit the boiling point. Kurama leaned over Yomi, eyes glazed as though the heat he felt had actually produced steam, staring at the twin ruins in the other's face, ruined so long ago that even Kurama's puzzle-solver gaze could not detect evidence o scarring, but could envision still the look once there, once produced, amber eyes glowing with the fever that overcomes one coping with the presence of something foreign.

Taking deep breaths, taking in air riddled with the Makai vapors that just earlier he'd meant to scapegoat, letting it in, out, permeating him, touching every quivering, confused cell that made up this hybridized body, he reached up first one shaky limb, then the other, and rested, gripped, pushed each hand on an upward-protruding knee. He would make these new eyes remember that fevered look where now no eyes glared.

Muscles aside from his own flexed, coiled, tightened as he eased back just a moment, and then lurched forward with a snarl, voracious, his spirit boiling over, into the demon, the other demon.

—The _passive _demon.

—The _unaffected _demon.

As though the mask had broken off of his countenance, only to in turn suture whole again over Yomi's. He clenched his jaw, and lurched forward again, aggression infused with something desperate, that in his nude self's newfound nakedness he was sure Yomi could smell as strongly as the sweat dripping off his human form.

_Despair_.

Lurched, collapsed, pounded, Kurama's temples pounded with the same blood that gushed, rushed to his face, his very red face, that he hid between very red hair and the skin that covered the flesh that covered the bone that covered the organ, the still, demonic organ, the _passive_, _unaffected _organ—

Vibrations, upward, Yomi's vibrations against Kurama's vibrations, vibrations in his chest and his head, vibrations coming up beneath Yomi's sternum, armor of the organ that directed the blood to other organs—such as the _other_ organ, come up, stayed up, _unaffected_—vibrations that weaved together as so many aural fibers that produced the muscle _sound_: a lean muscle that flexed: a growl, growling—

_Yelping_, as Kurama was displaced, and replaced face-first on the demon king's mattress. He snatched his face out of the sheets, barely catching his breath before a pair of hands sized his hips and pushed them up, making him lose his balance on his elbows and fall face-first into the sheets again.

"Yo—" he gasped, scrambling to keep his balance while Yomi maneuvered him, positioned his legs so that they propped up his pelvis, spread his legs, flung up his coattails—

"Yomi!" he cried out in dread: Shuichi had made no impact on the king of Gandhara, but he knew better than to expect the reciprocal. He tensed up, first in anticipation.

Then, in startlement, ironically because Yomi's hold on him, though maintained, softened. Fingers that dug into the soft skin that covered the tender flesh that covered the bones that Yomi could oh so easily break, relaxed, and ghosted along the prickling skin, the quivering flesh, and disappeared altogether.

—And reappeared as one, open-palmed, cupped so slightly, hurtlingly reuniting with his skin, aloud, a sharp _Smack!_

"Ah!" Kurama narrated the afterburn, the permeation through stunned skin into stung flesh.

Again: _Smack!_

"_Ah!_" Kurama echoed, elbows giving this time.

_Smack!_

"Augh!" the sheets muffled his refrain. Having gone down as far as he could in the one direction, the next _Smack! _served to bring him up in the other, the target of Yomi's blows involuntarily rendering itself all the more vulnerable to attack, with each attack, and with each attack, fracturing, the definition halving the target area sharpening as each attack rendered upward and outward, Kurama's legs spreading as his ass rose, his cries continuously muffled in the bedding.

Ceasefire. Kurama lifted, tilted his chin at an angle where his face was now not so entirely submerged in bedding. He shifted, or tried to: somehow the hem of the coat, Yomi's coat, had become lodged in one place under a knee, in another twisted round an elbow; and the sweating, the incriminating act that had slid him into this sticky situation to begin with, had become as an adhesive to those closer parts of the coat, causing the coat to appropriately coat him almost like a second, awkward skin; and consequently he had become tied up in the coat, imprisoned in Yomi's coat, braced in a pose that compromised any current action, and the nature of future action, if he remained as he was now. He tried to wriggle free, but due to current constriction the only parts of his body capable of actual movement were those of dubious help, his legs and that juncture where the backs of them met and became a cohabitate part, and any movement of these only rendered him further upward and outward.

He wasn't even cold anymore, traitorous body that had prompted the cloth confines!

Reluctantly he implored: "Yomi—A-Ah!"

The hand had returned, not bombarding the posterior exterior, but had delved into the interior, or rather the foyer, paused its knocking against the entryway to the true interior. "Is it cold?" the owner of the hand asked.

_No_, it wasn't cold, nothing was cold anymore, and if it had been cold it was for the briefest second, and Kurama had reacted less to the scant temperature extreme than to the texture, thick and gelatinous.

"What is that?" he demanded. He still did not trust the demon, especially in this circumstance, and wouldn't put it past his wannabe physician to take advantage of his personal fluctuations, to attempt alternative treatments where oral avenues had denied them before.

He went rigid—a finger had slid in. "_Yomi!_" he snarled, bucking—which hindered himself more than it did the demon behind him, as he lost his brace and slid to one side, or rather everything above his waist did, as Yomi grasped his hips and held them steady. "I won't take anything, Yomi!" he insisted frantically, kicking at the Goat with one leg, foot striking an impassive knee cap.

Now the other demon went rigid for a moment, and then exhaled audibly, breath intoning that same mixture of self-satisfaction and ruefulness.

"Backdoor assaults like that are more in keeping with _your_ old repertoire, Kurama," Yomi informed him, matter-of-factly, not accusatively, not bitterly. The hands released his hips, his legs, and moved to his waist. Despite himself he let out another little gasp as Yomi gripped and flipped him, so that he lay now flat on his back, freed from the confines of coat and covers, able without hindrance to breathe, to move, to see, to see Yomi kneeling over him, that organ standing over him, persisting no doubt from stubbornness as surely as his own persisted from—he didn't want to admit it—excitement. Yomi's glistened head to base, and after a moment Kurama realized why the gelatinous substance, thick and slick.

Either side of his waist constricted as Yomi tightened his grip; he felt heat, not coming out of him, but mixing with and pooling close to his body and Yomi leaned in close.

"If I wanted to be a villain," the demon said, voice spoken softly, but textured harshly, "I could easily pin you down and force whatever substance I wanted, for whatever purpose I wanted, down your fragile human throat—or up alternate routes, anything, for whatever reason."

Kurama's fragile human throat began to vibrate with a firm, if faint, sound akin to a growl, or a weak whine, that might have communicated defense as easily as distress. His hands balled, then uncurled as claws, and shifted along the bedding, inward towards Yomi and himself. The Goat made no move to subdue them.

"Keep that in mind," he told Kurama, and bore down closer on the body beneath him.

A grimace on Kurama's behalf accommodated the jaws that came in collision with his own, the teeth that bit at his lips and the tongue that seemingly couldn't wait to greet his. Meanwhile a larger, denser pelvis ground against his, a slick prepped instrument rubbed against a slick prepped point of incision, _one, two, three…_

_Recoil! _Kurama jerked his face away from Yomi's, features convulsing, as from the shoulders down his limbs and torso did much the same. His mouth at first appeared to cave in, and then materialized again and split open in loud, ragged gasps, which finally sharpened into a more elegant, articulate "_AH!_"

Above his twitching form Yomi's had frozen, except the lips, which whispered something half-growl, half-curse. Except the hips, which after a moment ventured forward, by a mere fraction—

"It hurts!" Kurama managed hoarsely. He threw himself backward, as though trying to sink into the mattress, to escape and hide. "Ah-AH—!"

"Shh!" As he retreated, so had Yomi. The demon knelt, still over him but now with several inches allotted between them, sightless eyes half-concealed by brows knotted severely in consternation, in—_perhaps_—concern. "Shh…."

Kurama said nothing, and instead focused on his breathing, which he steadied from harsh gasps to deep exhalations, growing quieter with each rise and fall of his sternum, each expansion and contraction of his ribs. He was too hot, from sickness, from activity, from _embarrassment_, and after a few experimental spasmsfreed himself from the coat, and lied on top of it, not wanting to move further.

Until he saw Yomi rise from the foot of the bed, in search of the clothes that Kurama had stripped from him.

"_Wait!"_ he gasped, straining his body until at last one leg, foot extended and brushed against Yomi's thigh, closest still to the bed. Intently he stared in the dark at the demon that towered over him, and raising his leg ever so slightly, ever so slightly nudged at higher anatomy—

And cried out, as his foot was snatched, and his entire body slid forward, down the bed, following it.

"You're asking for it," Yomi rumbled, one hand caressing the fine bone structure of the top of Kurama's foot, while firmly the other gripped the sole. Kurama said nothing as Yomi's hands began to wander, forefinger and thumb of one pinching either side of his ankle, while the other slid along his calf, his knee, his thigh. "So soft," the demon king stated, in what might have been appreciation, or a taunt.

Which elaborated on itself quickly as he added: "Milk-fed. I stopped because I thought that if I continued much further, you'd start crying for your human mother."

Hot-flash, which spread over Kurama's body in angry prickles. He kicked out his foot again, and using Yomi as both target and brace lunged his body upwards, as Yomi in turn sprung onto the bed, down toward him. The two wrestled for a couple of minutes, Kurama snarling, striking out whichever limb was free against whichever part of Yomi's body was most closely available; while Yomi with the exception of the odd grunt was quiet, enduring Kurama's strikes, all the while working and securing a grip around the smaller body's shoulders, hips, and finally seizing and pinning the struggling form back against the bed once more.

"Remember your place, Kurama," Yomi breathed into his ear.

He tensed, growled, but all the while listed and evaluated the connotations that command carried with it. He was Kurama—not _Yoko_, or at least hardly, or if so only occasionally, otherwise he was simply Kurama—the humanized demon, returned from foreign lands in a foreign body, and feeling foreign surrounded both by his Gandharan setting and his own frailer, increasingly fickler flesh, subordinate to Yomi, who remained, who remained a demon, who remained true to their old dreams, who despite Kurama's manipulations remained in power over him right now, politically as well as _right now_, crouched literally over him, him who was pinned in human—human?—flesh between the bed and the monarch of the land of the world all of which reminded him that currently in this position in this form in this condition in this moment he was _the lesser power_.

Yomi, if so inclined, could flay him open right now and eat him, human fillet, and the best Kurama could hope for in this sickly state would be to give the demon food poisoning.

He relaxed a little: Yomi had no intention of devouring him, if only in that manner. He relaxed a little, because if he was tense throughout it'd make the experience all the more uncomfortable. He relaxed a little, thinking, abstractly, that perhaps by taking in the demon, the other demon's _essence _if one would call it that, it might awaken or augment his dormant own, trying so hard of late to unfurl and flare up.

He had gone limp, with one exception, spurred on perhaps by the blood rushing throughout his body, or by the anger that had prompted the rush, or by the hormones roused by said anger—or was it vice-versa?—or by the excitement prompted by the possibility promised within his own mind, or by, perhaps, a stubbornness akin to that of the demonic force that, prompted by his slack in resistance, once again came crushing down against him.

"_How do you want it?_" Yomi whispered into his ear, tongue bathing the lobe.

Kurama shuddered and went bright red. On his stomach it was hard to breathe; on his back the angle was more painful…

"On your back," he replied resolutely.

He felt more than saw lips part, teeth bare in amusement. The other head eased away from his, the other body from his, as the demon king abdicated, and Kurama took his place on top without force this time.

Kneeling in a neutral position, he appraised the body laid out beneath him, and debating a moment over in which direction to proceed, straddled Yomi's hips, facing away from that eyeless but disturbingly perceptive face, wrapping one hand around the base of Yomi's shaft, bracing the other against a protruding hipbone as he lifted himself, crouched forward, took the tip in…

—And promptly lost it.

He let out an irritated sound, searched, found it, tried again. Barely wedged the head in, sank perhaps an inch—tensed, forced himself to relax (what a contradiction!—and yet it felt like that had become his own regular state of personal being), eased up with the intent of easing back down.

_Lost_, again.

"_Fuck!_" Kurama found some of his earlier assertiveness, aggression, and indicated this not only in the new harshness of language but also in another furtive search and seizure, another attempt, that ended in another cry, first of pain, then frustration as the process was again cut short. Behind him Yomi exhaled low moans when he handled the shaft, fingered the head; and when it resisted, again and again, rumblings, first the echoes of those which vibrated earlier, and then superseding their predecessors, expressions of impatience, warnings to Kurama to hurry up and recover both their selves, lest his difficulties rouse Yomi out of repose, which only aggravated that already aggravated Kurama's persisting frustrations.

"Ah!" cried Kurama, not in surprise or pain as previously, but in indignation as Yomi, finally too impatient, sprang up and backward simultaneously, robbing Kurama of his seat as well as equilibrium. He gasped as again he found himself bored down upon from behind, down into the covers and the mattress, and floundered on his elbows in an effort to keep his face from being planted into that smothering mess again. Up went his hips—down went his face—except this time he was almost immediately wrenched back up out of the sheets again, a hand fisted in his hair at the nape of his neck saving him from the suppression of air. Or trying to keep him still, as Yomi positioned and attempted entry again.

Failed, compromised: Kurama's head was pushed back down, though with Yomi's grip focused where it was, Kurama's face was tilted to one side and thus free; his legs were pushed open and the most intimate space shared between them, his ass, and his own genitals was immediately filled by Yomi's, shoved in and then rubbed violently back and forth, sending Kurama up and down a certain span of mattress while Yomi thrusted into this makeshiftspace, thrusted into the space and into Kurama's balls, coming out beneath them, holding up, rubbing against his penis, thus causing his movements to vary with subtle undulations of his hips, thus varying his grunts at being pushed and shoved with little moans at being stimulated such: "Ah, ah, ah, ah…."

"Ah, ah—_ah_—AH—_OHH_…!"

Wet stuff dripping onto the front, down the interior of his thighs, some of it his, as well as coating the bottom of his genitals and sticking in the space between his buttocks, Yomi's work. He panted, then collapsed face-first into the bed.

Yomi strategically fell and stretched out to one side of him. When a hand brushed along his ribs he shuddered, drew up both arms toward his face so that Yomi could not read the expression on his face—an absurd precaution, and he knew it—and so that Yomi could not so easily decipher the noises he made, muffled as they were by a complicated pretzel of human flesh and bone.

Human flesh and bone, that would not, could not conform to a demon's desires.

Sudden lightness to the side of him; on the other side, a hand placed, not brushed, on his shoulder:

"Do you know how they pasteurize milk?"

Kurama took a breath, lifted his face, blotched and tearstained, out of his armed fortress, and stared quizzically at Yomi. "They pasteurize it to prevent sickness—"

"Some humans pasteurize it to kill germs," Yomi interrupted. "I know that; but that is why, not how. Do you know how they do it?" Kurama blinked, still too put off by the impromptu question to answer. "They homogenize it. They boil it, and all the components come together. How is your temperature?"

Beginning to absorb Yomi's meaning, Kurama slowly sat up, and then more slowly eased off the side of the bed and stood. His balance wasn't solid, but his knees at least were steady.

"I can walk," he told Yomi. "I can walk back to my room. Give me my clothes."

Yomi let out something related to a snort. "Your clothes were soaked. Wear this." In the dark he walked to a chest, opened it, pulled out and handed Kurama a light robe. The coat Kurama had been wearing, Yomi's coat, lay contorted on the bed, wet with both their sweat and come. "I will stand in the hall while you walk back to your bed. I will hear if you stumble, and if you fall I _will _incapacitate you until this bout passes. You will go to bed and sleep this off, and starting tomorrow you will begin to eat and drink in accordance with the demands placed by that body of yours."

Kurama took the robe without protest. The plan: "I won't be fattened up by steroids in my food," he told Yomi, reciprocating the demon king's firmness. "I won't be driven bipolar by any hormones, either."

The sound Yomi made this time was without argument a pure snort. _Too late_, it meant, and promptly interpreting it Kurama glowered at him. Aloud the Goat said: "I won't add anything, if you don't deprive anything."

"Agreed," Kurama replied tersely, and putting on the robe began to walk, refusing to look back at Yomi, who true to his word followed Kurama into the hall and stood there while the virulent hybrid walked the length to his bedroom. Not once did he stumble.

Once arrived he opened his window—enough of cold rooms making him feel all the more fevered!—and threw himself onto the bed, and lying there stared discontented into space for several moments.

And then he parted his robe, slid his hand downward.

Gandhara was humid, and Kurama was still hot.

**End "Virulence"**

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**A/N: **Wherefore shall the virus spread? I'm not entirely sure yet, because I need to relocate what little notes I took for chapter three. It shall be the most speculative of the project, since I positioned it where I have littlewhere else to go time-wise but post-series. I hope this experiment continues to be enjoyable, next time's when the philosophy shall grow more prevalent!


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